Another month, another update to the KDE 4.0 series. This time, we are presenting KDE 4.0.4, dubbed File-Not-Found to the audience. KDE 4.0.4 brings improvements to KHTML, Okular and various other components. We recommend that people who are already running KDE 4.0 releases update to 4.0.4. The emphasis of this release lies, as usual in stabilising, bugfixing, performance improvements and updated translations -- no new features. The developers have again squashed quite some bugs which you can find some of in the changelog. With this release, the KDE community continues to support the KDE 4.0 series that has been released for brave users earlier this year. KDE 4.1, to be released this summer (in the northern-hemisphere) will bring new features and applications. KDE 4.1 is based on the recently released Qt 4.4 while KDE 4.0.4 is still based on Qt 4.3 as is the case with the whole KDE 4.0 series. So put on your update shoes and install 4.0.4 today.

Most people I know either got back to kde 3.5.9 or jumped to the 4.1 alphas. I'm curious to know how many masochists (brave?) people are still on the 4.0 series.

PS: I do think releasing 4.0 was a good decision but I don't think anyone is still using it now, so maybe kde devs should forget about it and just focus on 4.1 now. I know I wouldn't care less if there is no 4.0.5 in june but a kick ass 4.1 in july :D

AFAIK, the latest Kubuntu and the upcoming openSUSE 11.0 are both using the KDE 4.0 branch since 4.1 isn't out yet. This allows them to provide a stable (if somewhat lacking in some features compared with 3.5) and shiny platform for users while giving them a clear upgrade path once 4.1 is released.

Up until now, the benefit has been that having the 4.0 branch in bugfixing mode has meant that whenever a bug is fixed in the branch, the unstable trunk (4.1) would benefit from it too. Otherwise, it would be quite likely that few bugs would have been fixed since January since all the devs would have been focussing on adding features for 4.1.

Also I think for users who's distros provided STABLE 4.0 packages and UNSTABLE 4.1 packages they would likely choose the stable packages, if not for the whole desktop then for things like the games, konqueror etc. without having to worry about the UNSTABLE label.

Fedora 9, which is due next week, also uses KDE 4.0, for the same reason. It will ship with KDE 4.0.3. KDE 4.0.4 will be available in updates-testing at release time and move to updates after a few days (usually 1 or 2 weeks, depending on testing feedback). The current plan (subject to change) is to push KDE 4.1.0 as an update for Fedora 9 once it's released. KDE 4.1 snapshots will hit Rawhide (our development branch) as soon as Fedora 9 is released and Rawhide starts targeting Fedora 10.

No, Fedora 9 was already in "critical bugfixes only" mode when 4.0.4 was tagged. We need approximately 1 week to fix the last blockers (without breaking anything else) and 1 week to get the images mirrored, which means we can't really update all of KDE two weeks before the release, even for a bugfix release (and the Fedora release engineering team would probably have vetoed it). Moreover, sometimes some tarballs have to be respun by KDE upstream between the tagging / packager prerelease and the actual release, we wouldn't have been able to guarantee that any respun tarballs would have made it if we had rushed 4.0.4 in. (In this case, kdelibs was respun on May 5 because it reported the version number incorrectly.)

Please trust us to know what we're doing. It's not like our users will have to wait another 6 months to get the new version, it will be in updates-testing on release day and in updates shortly afterwards.

I'm running 4.0 I like it more than 3.5, but I'm waiting rather impatiently for 4.1.anything binaries for Kubuntu. I'm getting more and more tempted to switch to OpenSUSE, but I'm really not wanting to reinstall/configure my system, so I'm just hoping things will improve.

The openSUSE Live-CD seems to have some problems with hardware detection which have been allegedly fixed (according to bugzilla). I'll file a couple of bug reports regarding my own hardware (macbook) once I find some time but there's a chance that the bugs are limited to the Live-CD. Nevertheless, such bugs are bad enough as I doubt that many people will install openSUSE if their hardware doesn't work in the live session.

I have just updated to 4.0.4 (on 10.3) using one-click. I have the same problem that I had with 4.0.3, it starts up OK then crashes back to log-in screen. Not complaining, just wondered if anyone had any ideas

That's a reasonable answer, was hoping for "oh yeah, need to tweak that" but at risk of sounding like a moron, if e.g., konqueror crashes it generates a back trace in which case even I can work out what to do, however this one goes goes silently back to log in without a hint. No idea where to go next. I even checked dmesg in hope rather than expectation.

I made the switch a couple weeks ago. Having the latest KDE 4.1 without building anything is just nice. (And my other computer runs Gentoo so it's not like I'm scared of building). OpenSuse is obviously for corporate environment, it's install process has lot's of control including giving the user the ability to install a pretty messed up system (which I did :P). Kubuntu's set of sane default apps makes more sense for the desktop user.

> OpenSuse is obviously for corporate environment, it's install process has lot's of control including giving the user the ability to install a pretty messed up system

This is more the result of being an early adopter of a graphical installation than of some corporate tendency. However, this has all been changed in openSUSE 11.0 too -- installation takes something like 18 minutes, requires about 6-8 clicks, and takes out a lot of questions from the user.

I selected the KDE desktop. But since I was wanting to install KDE 4.1, I deselected KDE and selected XFCE.

But xdm took me to FVWM not XFCE. I guess it's an insult to the FVWM folks that I consider their window manager to be so horrible as to define my system "messed up". :) Anyways it took a bit of wrestling but now my KDE 4.1 laptop is rockin.

When I first installed 4.1 over 4.0 some apps were not working. Later i found out that it was my fault. Should've deleted the .kde4 folder before updating. After I finally fixed that plasma was broken due to the tokamak changes. KDE 4.0 is running smoothly and stable on my system. To me it seems more of a hassle to have 4.1 running atm.

Uh, if KDE 4.1 doesn't work if you have settings from 4.0, that's not your fault, but a serious bug in KDE. New apps are supposed to handle (or migrate using kconf_update) old config files, even KDE 3 ones!

The 4.0.x has been perfectly stable. It's not a scary thing to run at all. It would be scary, however, to run KDE 4.1 alpha. Due to the tagging being in the middle of the Plasma API refactoring Plasma is super buggy and crashy.

KDE 4.0.x, on the other hand, is stable and can be installed without compiling anything, unlike a more stable revision of trunk.

Lots of people are running KDE4; probably more than you think. It is very stable, and is the only stable release you can install without compiling crap.